Hunter's Trail (A Scarlett Bernard Novel)

by Melissa F. Olson

  Waters shrugged and nodded, the responsibility of minding Jesse officially handed off to someone else. Jesse had to stand on one foot at a time to put on the booties, wobbling a little but managing to not fall over. Then Runa lifted the tape for him and he ducked under.

  “Watch your step,” she ordered. “They put markers near the blood splatters they could find, but they keep finding more. Try not to step on any.” Jesse nodded and concentrated on stepping around the little yellow evidence markers.

  “I’m just about done here,” Runa said over her shoulder. “But the ME is already getting his stuff out to take the body. You’ve only got a minute.”

  Jesse followed her into the spotlights. There was a small crowd of crime scene technicians still moving around the scene, Glory among them, and the medical examiner’s people were waiting with a stretcher. Jesse nodded to a couple of techs he’d worked with before, feeling his cheeks redden self-consciously. It made no sense for him to be in the middle of such a complicated crime scene. He looked around for the Homicide Special detectives. “Runa, where’s . . .”

  His voice trailed off as he noticed a woman in her late thirties approaching them. She was exactly as tall as Jesse’s six feet, a skinny woman with a splatter of freckles across her face and slightly frizzy red hair that she’d grown too long and tied back in a lifeless ponytail that hung down her back like a kicked dog. Despite her gangly limbs, she had no trouble negotiating the evidence markers. She made a beeline straight for Jesse with her right hand extended.

  Runa started to introduce them. “Jesse, this is—”

  “Sarabeth Bine,” said the red-haired woman. Up close she was a little older than he’d first thought, with plain weathered features. She shook Jesse’s hand vigorously. “And you’re Cruz. I’d introduce my partner, but he went to inform the next of kin. Runa tells me you have an eye for the weird ones. I appreciate you taking a look at this.”

  “Not a problem,” Jesse said, trying to sound confident.

  Bine looked thoughtfully at Jesse for a second, then pointed a finger at his chest. “You’re the one who wrapped up that La Brea Park thing a few months back, right? The golden pretty boy?”

  “I’m not—I wasn’t really,” Jesse stammered, blushing fiercely.

  Sarabeth Bine continued as though he hadn’t spoken. “That was weird. Okay, well, sign the register, take a quick look, and update me before you go. I gotta talk to the evidence guys about the search.”

  “Search?”

  She glanced at Runa. “You didn’t tell him? Good.” Bine smirked. “More fun if it’s a surprise.” To Runa, she added, “You should start packing up, but be ready to step in if they find anything.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Runa promised. Bine rushed off again like a questing bumblebee, and Jesse let out a breath he’d somehow been holding. “I gotta get back to work,” Runa murmured. “You good?”

  “Yeah. Thanks,” Jesse said, off balance. He automatically reached out a hand to touch Runa’s shoulder, but stopped the gesture halfway there, awkwardly turning it into a professional clap on the back. Runa rolled her eyes and went off to finish her job.

  Jesse put both women out of his mind and stepped up to the bodies. Both were nude, with male genitalia. The unforgiving spotlights washed out their skin tones, but Jesse could tell the man on the left had been white and had been shorter than the man on the right, who had been slim and black. They both looked like they’d been chewed and torn and sliced into ribbons of tissue. Jesse had seen a couple serious maulings back when he’d first joined the department, and this looked sort of like a super-powered version of that. The skin on all of the extremities had been shredded. Both bodies also had enormous, gaping torso wounds that must have flooded the ground with blood. The biggest single injury, though, appeared to be facial. Jesse inched even closer, trying to stay out of the worst of the blood splatter, and peered at the bodies for a long moment before his eyes were able to translate what he was seeing.

  Both men were missing their lower jaws. It looked like they’d been torn off.

  “That’s fucked up,” Jesse said aloud. He glanced around and saw Glory frowning over at him. She had been painstakingly tweezing bloody plant matter into little evidence baggies.

  “Did you guys find the jawbones?” he asked her.

  “No. But Bine has a team looking,” she said, her voice hushed. “I’ve never seen anything like this, Jesse.”

  “I’ve never heard of anything like this,” Jesse replied absently. His first thought was werewolf, just based on the savagery. But this didn’t feel like the nova wolf’s kills, which had been methodical, calculated. Cold, but with purpose. This was messier than that. And why would any werewolf, nova or not, take the victims’ jaws?

  But if it wasn’t a werewolf, what else could it be? Jesse thought suddenly of the La Brea Park murders, which had been committed by a human nutcase who liked playing with body parts. Those killings had been farther down the spectrum of gruesomeness, much more scattered and frantic than the nova’s previous kills. But these killings just didn’t have the same chaotic, sadistic glee as the La Brea Park murderer. His brow furrowed. Was it possible that this had nothing to do with Old World at all?

  Jesse adjusted his weight, preparing to stand, but the movement caused the light to shift on the victim as well, and something shiny caught his eye. He shifted back, then again. There. Amidst the gore, he spotted the shiny surface of deep scar tissue. He played his flashlight over the body’s chest, and then moved the light up so he could stare at the top half of the face.

  “What is it?” Glory asked anxiously. The bustle around them was picking up; Jesse was officially in the way of the ME’s people. But he wasn’t paying any attention, because he recognized the corpse.

  “Hello, Terrence,” Jesse said aloud.

  Chapter 25

  Werewolves. Someone had torn up two werewolves.

  Once he’d realized that the taller man was Terrence Whittaker, it didn’t take long for Jesse to recognize the shorter, stockier guy as Terrence’s sidekick, Drew Riddell. He’d talked to both of these men just the day before. And now he knew why there was so much blood and gore at the scene. Scarlett had told him that unless you were with a null, werewolves were nearly impossible to kill; they healed too quickly. He knew that Scarlett hadn’t been anywhere near this scene, so whoever had done this had needed to essentially wound these guys faster than they could heal, until they finally bled out.

  Could the nova do that? What about Will? After all, Will had openly admitted to there being conflict between him and the other wolves. If Terrence had pushed him far enough, could he have done something like this?

  No, Jesse reasoned, if this had been Will, he’d have gotten rid of the bodies himself, or at least called Scarlett, who would have called Jesse to help. Whoever this was didn’t have access to Scarlett’s “services.” But even the nova didn’t leave bodies out in the open, in public. And he still didn’t understand the thing with the jaws.

  Jesse got to his feet, getting out of the ME guys’ way, and leaned a bit to put his mouth close to Glory’s ear. “Call Dashiell, tell him it’s Old World,” Jesse told her. “These guys were werewolves.”

  “You know them?” Glory said hopefully. “Are you gonna give their names to Bine?”

  Shit. Jesse paused, considering. If he told Bine the victim’s ID, she would immediately ask how he knew them. Then again, if he didn’t tell Bine, and in the course of the investigation she found out that he’d talked to both of those guys earlier that day, his career would be over. Worse than that—he might even be a suspect, especially if anyone found out that he’d shot Whittaker in the leg. Jesse cursed under his breath in Spanish, and said, “No. I’m not gonna say anything about the IDs for now. Let’s give Dashiell a little time to work.”

  “Jesse, the sun’s coming up,” Glory pointed out.

  Jesse glanced up. It was hard to see past the lights of the city, but sure enough, warm pink light was b
eginning to break over the LA skyline. Dashiell would be dead for the next twelve hours or so. “Oh, come on,” Jesse complained. He stepped away from the body, pulled out his own phone, and called Will, who picked up right away.

  “We have a problem,” Jesse said into the phone. He tried to keep his words vague, like Scarlett always did, on the off chance that anyone was listening. Scarlett’s paranoia was really rubbing off on him. “I just got a call from a work friend. Two of your . . . erm . . . family members were killed tonight. The top two on your list.”

  Silence. Then Will said, “You’re sure it’s them?”

  Jesse considered that for a second, and said, “With the taller one, I’m sure. With the shorter one, I’m ninety-five percent.”

  “How did they die?” Will inquired. There was a note of hope in his voice, and for a moment Jesse thought the alpha was asking for details over the phone, which seemed out of character. But then he understood: Will was hoping that Drew and Terrence had been hit by a bus, or drowned accidentally, something like that.

  “Well,” Jesse said, glancing back toward the crime scene behind him, “it wasn’t a nice quiet stroke in their sleep.”

  “Okay,” Will said, disappointed. “I gotta think about this. Thanks for the call.”

  “Wait!” Jesse protested. “You’re not getting it. Two dead, and it’s after sunrise.”

  There was another long silence, and Jesse checked his phone’s screen to make sure the call hadn’t dropped. “Will?” he said.

  “Dammit,” Will said with feeling. “We’re not set up for this. LA is not supposed to be a place where this kind of thing happens.”

  “What do they do in other places?” Jesse asked, trying to keep his voice reasonable. “You guys have stayed hidden for an awfully long time. How does it work?”

  “Different things, in different places,” Will said tiredly. “Corruption, more murder, tighter control on everyone. That’s not going to help us right now. But I don’t have Dashiell’s contacts. He’s kept them from me in case—well. You’re just going to have to stall until sundown, and let Dashiell throw his weight and money around.”

  Stall. Right. That was just what Jesse wanted to do right now. He’d agreed to this whole deal so he could stop deceiving his fellow cops, but saying so wouldn’t help right now. “Fine,” he said, working to keep the snap out of his voice. After a moment’s thought, he added, “Hey, Will? Have you ever heard of . . . your kind of people . . . being killed, looks kind of like a mauling, but their lower jaws are ripped off?”

  There was a sudden crash on Will’s end of the line. Jesse had heard the sound before, and knew Will had dropped the phone. He waited, mystified, for the alpha to return to the line. “Pick up Scarlett,” Will growled. His voice had changed, becoming deeper and more terrifying. “Meet me at Dashiell’s in an hour.”

  “I have to tell them something here,” Jesse protested. “Besides, it’s after sunrise—”

  Will cut him off. “One hour!” he roared, his voice barely human. And the line went dead.

  Chapter 26

  Jesse left the crime scene without a word to anyone, even Glory and Runa. He hated looking like a flake in front of Bine, who was expecting a report, but it seemed like a better option than lying to her face.

  He drove straight to Scarlett’s. She didn’t answer her phone on the way over, so he was prepared to wait on her doorstep for quite a while, knocking and ringing the bell. To his surprise, though, she answered the door a few seconds after the first knock. She looked tired, but she was dressed in a clean thermal shirt and clean yoga pants, her hair damp from the shower, a piece of peanut-buttered toast in the hand that wasn’t steering her cane. “Couldn’t sleep,” she explained around a mouthful of toast. There were dark smudges under her eyes, which stood out against the paleness of her skin. She’s pushing too hard, Jesse thought guiltily. Swallowing, she added, “I saw the missed call. I was gonna call you back after breakfast. What’s up?”

  “You . . . don’t look so good,” Jesse said tentatively. “Have you seen your doctor lately?”

  Scarlett rolled her eyes. “I’m fine, Cruz. Well, I’ll be fine as soon as we find this asshole and I can spend a whole week icing my knee. Now, what’s going on?”

  Ten minutes later they were heading toward the freeway on-ramp in Scarlett’s van. She had insisted on taking it because, as she pointed out, Will hadn’t actually said whether or not there would be a crime scene to clean up. Jesse hadn’t argued with her because he suspected it was easier for her to get in and out of the van with her swollen knee. And because she had let him drive.

  Murders or not, the morning was lovely. The smog that had hung heavy over the city the day before had lightened just enough to let sunlight filter through, and the last bits of gorgeous sunrise colors were still fading as Jesse drove east toward Pasadena. It was early in the morning on New Year’s Day, so traffic was blissfully light. For a moment Jesse felt tension lift from him as he cruised down the empty freeway, crossing the lines of shadow created by the palm trees that grew along the side of the road. Damn, he loved this stupid city. He hated it too, once in a while, but he’d never live anywhere else.

  He told Scarlett about the two dead bodies in the cemetery, and Will’s weird reaction. When he’d finished, Jesse asked, “The thing with the jaws, does that mean anything to you?”

  Scarlett frowned in the seat beside him. “I think . . .” She shook her head. “You know when you can almost remember something, but it’s just not quite there? I feel like Olivia said something about jawbones once, but I just can’t remember the context.”

  “Maybe it’ll come to you if you stop trying to remember,” Jesse suggested. “Do you know why we’re meeting at Dashiell’s instead of Will’s or the bar?”

  He glanced at Scarlett as he said it, and Jesse thought he saw a flash of something on her face—fear. But she just shook her head.

  Hayne answered Dashiell’s door wearing the same polo shirt and chinos he’d worn on Jesse’s last visit, this time with a Desert Eagle strapped in the holster on his shoulder. Jesse had always considered that particular handgun too ostentatious to take seriously, but Hayne was large enough to make it seem completely rational. When he greeted Scarlett and Jesse he had the same neutral expression Jesse had seen before, but there was something about his tone and posture that seemed . . . troubled.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Scarlett said bluntly, and Jesse felt a rush of appreciation. Will and Dashiell might be frequently cryptic, but at least his partner didn’t play games.

  “I don’t know, exactly. But I do know that Mr. Carling wants you to go wake Dashiell and Beatrice,” Hayne said simply.

  Jesse was surprised, but Scarlett’s expression merely tightened, and he realized she’d been expecting this. “You know I can’t do that,” Scarlett said levelly. Her eyes were locked on Hayne. “He’ll kill me.”

  “Why?” Jesse asked, focusing on her. “Is it really that big of a deal?”

  “Why don’t you two come inside,” Hayne said smoothly. “We can talk in the living room. Will should be here any second.”

  Slowly, so Scarlett could keep up on her bad leg, Hayne led them into the same room from earlier, the one with the glass doors that led out onto the patio. Jesse was really starting to hate this room.

  Nobody sat down. When the door closed behind them, Hayne began, “To answer your question, Detective, it is a very big deal. Dashiell is very . . . private.”

  Scarlett snorted, turning to face Jesse. “It’s a power thing,” she said simply. “A cardinal vampire couldn’t allow a simple human like me to choose when he lives and dies. At least, not without some kind of fatal gesture to swat me back down to my place.” She turned her head to glare at Hayne. “I’m not going to do it.”

  “Yes, you will.” The new voice came from just outside the door. Will twitched as he stepped into the room, and Jesse realized he’d hit Scarlett’s radius. The werewolf was dressed in khaki pant
s and a simple button-down that hid the hard muscle Jesse had seen the night before. His eyes were wild, searching the room like he expected ninjas to jump out and attack.

  Jesse took an instinctive step closer to Scarlett.

  She crossed her arms again. “No, I won’t,” she said stubbornly. “Why do you need to talk to him so badly? What can’t wait until sunset?”

  “The jaws,” Jesse guessed, watching Will closely. “It’s got something to do with the werewolf’s jaws.”

  Will pulled at his hair, which was already sticking up. Usually he was blandly handsome in a forgettable, Disney Channel dad kind of way, but even this close to Scarlett, he looked practically feral. “They have to know,” he muttered. “She met them before, she said, and he has to know they’re here.”

  Scarlett gave the alpha a worried look, her brow furrowed with distress. She glanced at Jesse. He hated the expression on her face, like she was right on the brink of panic. “Will’s gone bye-bye, Scarlett,” he said solemnly. “What have you got?”

  She flashed him a grin that pierced his heart. Before she could speak, though, the doorbell rang, a long series of notes that echoed through the house. Will said, “That’ll be Kirsten.”

  Hayne looked surprised, and a little uncomfortable, and Jesse remembered that Hayne and Kirsten had been married once. What did Kirsten have to do with any of this? Scarlett looked as confused as he felt, like they were watching a disc that had skipped.